So I just logged in to my account for the first time in a very, very long time, and I discovered that many of my pet names have been changed. When I adopted most of my pets I was on a 'famous dead composers' kick, see, and... now they all have underscores and numbers following their names. Was there some sort of event that happened while I was gone? Was there some sort of enforced name change? I'm very confused.

[img align=righthttp://i.imgur.com/djYHNxL.gif[/img] --[img align=right]http://i.imgur.com/9xrV6bt.gif[/img] --[img align=right]http://i.imgur.com/oHPAU4u.gif[/img] --[img align=right]http://i.imgur.com/UQ3RjfF.gif[/img] --[img align=right]http://i.imgur.com/11gyl7g.gif[/img] ] [font=cambria] If you go a year without logging in, your account is flagged as inactive which means people can take the names attached to your pets, or even your username. Rather than deleting the pets and everything attached, the system just adds numbers and stuff to the end of the names that others snagged.

You get one free name change for whatever pet(s) it happened with. [/font]

If you've not logged in for a long while, your pet names eventually become available for others to take, and yours are changed. This is what they came up with instead of just straight up deleting accounts.

I believe you can ask staff to change the names for free, but someone else will have to chime in on that. Sorry the names were changed D:

Oh wow. Okay. Thanks for the help, guys!

(edit) Wait, follow-up question. So does that mean that following a year of inactivity from the new owners of the names should that occur, I could 'take them back', so to speak? Do you happen to know if there's anything I need to do except to just enter the name change again?

[img align=righthttp://i.imgur.com/djYHNxL.gif[/img] --[img align=right]http://i.imgur.com/9xrV6bt.gif[/img] --[img align=right]http://i.imgur.com/oHPAU4u.gif[/img] --[img align=right]http://i.imgur.com/UQ3RjfF.gif[/img] --[img align=right]http://i.imgur.com/11gyl7g.gif[/img] ] [font=cambria] If the new owner goes inactive, yeah, the names should be up for grabs again. As far as I know, you should be able to change the name the usual way, but I've never had this happen so you might wanna see if there's someone with first-hand experience with the process ^_^; [/font]

oop, accidental double post >.>;

Okay, thank you so much for your help! Now I just gotta decide if I'd rather wait it out or give them intentionally misspelled names...

Considering you might have to file a ticket to get your free name changes, you might be better off just picking new names than waiting on the chance that the new owners might go inactive. It'd probably be easier to have them taken care of all at once rather than filing a new ticket and hoping to catch the name in time if/when it clears again.

Don't worry- you can change it free. That happened to me and all the names were still available :)

Just adding in, you shouldn't have to file a ticket to have your names changed. You go to your Pets page, click the dropdown menu for the pet in question (will look like a little pencil in the top right-hand corner) and go to change name. For any pet that has had its name taken, it should say this:

If it says 500 Cash Shop Credits for some reason, then you should file a ticket. The ability to change your pet's name won't expire, so take you time in choosing a new one. c:

Oh, I thought they deleted them. Anyway this is interesting.I am so sorry you lost the names you gave them or the name at adoption. :/

No, they started setting accounts to inactive instead of deleting them.

I also want to point out, though it is vaguely related to this topic, but I would say most, if not all, pets in the pound with NAME_### format are able to receive a free name change, it's connected to the pet, not the user! I thought that was neat. ^^

Thanks at . Good to know .

Thank you for posting that! I didn't know that was an option... that's very good to know while pound-surfing!

Are you sure this right? Have you done this recently? After reading your comment I went right to the pound and found the pet I'd been wanting (but had the "_###" on the name) and adopted it. When I went to change the name it said it would cost me 500 CSC.

I checked with the name AJ_### I can't remember, but it said it would cost 0 CSC. ^^ I did just check on Ethel_364 and it said it would cost 500csc, so they might have fixed it since I posted.

I myself did this with teo pets very recently, Tandi and Korl were the names I used to rename the name_### pets. It's very possible that pet's old owner really had it named in that format, it seems common for old neo players to do that since 99% of names are already gone there

I did consider the possibility that someone did just name their pet that way. I adopted a second pet with a name_### just to check but it also said it would cost 500CSC. Maybe the free name change on an adopted pet was a glitch and a staff member didn't know about it until booze mentioned it in this thread, or who knows and I just have horrible luck. Ha. The good news is that I did end up finding a pet with a nice name and I had a potion to change to a nice colour.

Hmm maybe renames are supposed to be account bound since it does give that person a chance to rename a pet if a name was taken, and it would make sense that abandoning a pet would make that option go away.